CURRENT LITERATURE.
Vittoria Colonna; Her Life and Poems. By Mrs. Henry Roscoe. (Macmillan.)—This sketch of Vittoria Colonna is elegantly and taste- fully written, and Mrs. Henry Roscoe has entered into her subject with the natural sympathy of a cultivated woman for one of her own order. Perhaps we should see more of Vittoria Colonna if she had not ban smothered under a pile of epithets by the customary exaggeration of her native language. The "curt Tuscan, sober, expurgate, shorn of an issinw," for which Browning longs, had not come into fashion when an Italian poetess was described as diva, diving, maravigliosa, altissima,
vertuosissima, dottissimcl, castissima, gloriosissima. And it may be owing to this flood of panegyric in the writers on whom Mrs. Henry Roscoe must have drawn for her materials that even in this bio- graphical sketch we have less of the woman than of the poetess. How- ever, Mrs. Henry Roscoe has been happy in the choice of such poems as bear on Vittoria's history and character. The friendship and interchange of mind between Vittoria and Michael Angelo naturally engross much of Mrs. Henry Roscoe's attention, and form a leading feature in her book. We should have been glad if more independence of thought had appeared in the hook, and if quotations from other writers, many of them contemporary, were less frequent. There are also one or two slight inaccuracies, as where " conantia frangere frangunt " is translated " they endeavouring to break are broken," and where a group of painters is classed together at the end of the fifteenth, and beginning of the six- teenth centuries, so as to include Fra Angelico, who died in 1455, and Tintoretto, who was not born till 1512.
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